White male’s experience not a model for everyone
Students should try to understand other’s differences, and attempt to understand what other races are facing. Treating each others as individuals and not stereotypes would promote racial harmony at TCU.
COMMENTARY
Jeff Dennis

In my last column, I made a statement dealing with racial profiling which I soon came to see was a very uninformed opinion that needed to be addressed. No reader took the opportunity to write me regarding this statement, yet I feel that it is a topic which merits further discussion.

The sentence, in short, stated that racial tensions at TCU are much more relaxed than in other areas of our society. Clearly this is not the first unfounded assumption I have made, but upon seeing the statement myself, I realized what a narrow point of view it represented.

For me, TCU has been a great improvement in terms of racial equality as compared to the area where I grew up. I have come to understand many new cultures and ethnic groups while at TCU, and I have further worked to drop any prejudices which might still linger in my mind, conscious or unconscious.

I made my biggest mistake by using my experience to generalize that the rest of the student body must find TCU to be just as welcoming in terms of diversity.

As a Caucasian male in the United States, I have rarely been in a group where I was in the numerical minority. I have never experienced a hate crime, been followed around by store clerks because of my race or been questioned by police simply because a suspect for a certain crime was of the same race as myself.

At TCU, we have many students who have had to deal with these problems, and yet there are also many who have not. The difficulty comes when these two groups are unable to understand each other. A person who has never been denied certain rights because of his or her race cannot even begin to understand what that experience is like.

In my own experiences, certain persons occasionally assume me to be slow and un-athletic because, as they say, “white men can’t jump.” Yet this is not a persistent problem I have to face, and it rarely bothers me. However, to have strangers constantly asking, “what sport do you play?” simply because of one’s race could easily grow old. Students might make this statement as an innocent attempt at making conversation, yet to the person to whom you are speaking, it can easily be construed as an implication that this person would not be at TCU were it not for sports.

If each of us would simply view our fellow student as an individual, and learn about his or her differences by communication, rather than by assumptions, we come closer to reaching a higher level of racial harmony. Few of us can truly understand “where you came from,” or “where you’ve been,” but what we can do is work together as TCU students to promote an environment of racial equality.

Call this an overly idealistic view if you like, but we’ve got to have some goal to work toward or else we’ll never get anywhere.

Jeff Dennis is a senior sociology major from Gail.